Welcome to Friendica.Eskimo.Com

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 Eskimo North Linux Shells, E-mail, Virtual Machines, Web Hosting.

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Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!

friendica - Link to source
The President of the Kyrgyz Republic met with the secretaries of the Security Councils of the CSTO member states en.odkb-csto.org/news/news_odk…

The President of the Kyrgyz Republic met with the secretaries of the Security Councils of the CSTO member states

OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
en.odkb-csto.org

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Federated Services

Federated Services are services which many instances form a network to provide a greater whole than the sum of their parts, each participant in the Fediverse is an “instance”. A message or other item made available on one instance is visible and available on other instances.

We make these services available to all people who do not abuse it in order to promote the values of Free Speech, and those of the United States Constitution First Amendment. A free republic is not possible without free speech and commercial mainstream media do not provide it. We also get some advertisement benefit from hosting these, it is our hope that people who see how fast and responsible our services are will decide to do hosting or use other paid services here.

There are numerous federated services available, we offer Macrobloging platform Friendica, Hubzilla; Microbloging services Mastodon, Misskey, a federated search engine, Yacy, and a federated cloud service, Nextcloud.

Macrobloging services are message systems that allow long form posts similar in format to Facebook. These allow for works of fiction, poetry, technical papers, news items, short stories, and more. These formats are most useful for discussion of social issues.

Microbloging services allow only short form posts similar in format to Twitter. While you can link to larger articles elsewhere, you have a relatively short character limit and so can not post them directly.

Censorship, is handled much different on the fediverse than on mainstream media like Twitter or Facebook. On the fediverse, each individual instance is responsible for content available on that instance, but does not censor the rest of the network. Thus if you find the rules of one instance too constraining you can move to another.

Federated search engines are analogous to federated message systems in that each instance chooses what portion of the internet it wants to crawl. When you enter a search term, the local instance queries all of the federated instances, collates and sorts the results and presents them to you. As with messages, each instance can have it’s own censorship policies but no one instance can censor the entire network.

Given the wild-west nature of the fediverse, it is probably not suitable for children under 14, and you’re guaranteed to find some material that will offend virtually everyone. With federated search engines, material that is inappropriate will usually be flagged sensitive or nsfw (not safe for work) so as long as you don’t expand material marked as such, you can avoid this sort of material. There are occasionally people who violate these rules, we do our best to remove such individuals none the less some will get through.

We offer the following federated services:

Friendica.Eskimo.Com
Friendica is a decentralized long format macrobloging message network. It is similar in format to facebook however there is no centralized censorship. Also, it is able to federate with all other federated message systems which use ActivityPub protocol and also we have extensions that allow it to speak to several other networks via other protocols.

Hubzilla.Eskimo.Com
Hubzilla is similar in message format to Friendica in that it allows long posts. However, it specializes in it’s ability to provide connectivity to multiple protocols and so we include it in our mix of federated services primarily for the better connectivity it offers. Hubzilla provides a great deal of interoperability between many networks though ActivityPub is still it’s primary protocol. Hubzilla gives you a greater degree of control over privacy than some of the other networks. You can create private channels that are served between hubzilla instances and other compatible instances.

Mastodon.Eskimo.Com
Mastodon is first and foremost an alternative to Twitter. While Twitter has Tweets, Mastodon has Toots. The format is very similar. Mastodon toots have a limit of 500 characters. Similar to the short limit of Twitter. This is why this platform is referred to as a Microbloging format. Mastodon interacts with other ActivityPub instances however when a long form blog post from another instance arrives, you are only shown a short portion with a link to follow to see the full post on the originating site.

NextCloud.Eskimo.Com
Nextcloud If you are a customer of Eskimo North, your login credentials will work without a domain extension to access Nextcloud. If you are not a customer you can apply for a Nextcloud account using your choice of login and password, in this case the login should include your originating network. Some features require an Eskimo North shell account to take full advantage of.

Pixelfed.Eskimo.Com
Pixelfed is a federated pixel gallery. A place where you can share your photos to the widest audience possible, and you can view what others have shared. Instance is new as of April 6th, 2025.


Yacy.Eskimo.Com
Yacy is a federated search engine. There are several thousand instances on the Internet. Each instances crawls whatever portion of the web the administrator requested. It is also possible for the administrator of a site with relatively few resources to request a larger site to do crawls on their behalf. Unfortunately, it does not provide a method for an end user to initiate a crawl, but if you send e-mail to support@eskimo.com and request a crawl, we will initiate a crawl on your behalf. If you are frustrated by the inability to locate content via mainstream search engines, give it a try.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Shell Accounts

Shell Accounts
A shell is a command line interface for an operating system. With most shell providers, a command line interface on one flavor of Linux or Unix is all you get. Eskimo North provides access to eight different popular Linux distributions and SunOS Unix. Eskimo North also full remote desktop capabilities using X2Go with sound, and also NX, VNC, and RPD without sound.

Account Types
We offer four different levels of shell accounts: Economy, Standard, Power, and Enterprise. Background tasks such as IRC bots, Game Servers, and the like are permitted on all account types except student. IRC servers are not permitted because of their tendency to draw denial of service attacks. Standard, Power, Enterprise, and Super-Max shells include a MySQL database allowing you to run a variety of LAMP stack based applications on your website and to use non-web based applications that require a database.

Web Hosting
Web hosting under our domain is provided with all shell accounts. You can host your own domains with virtual domains or web hosting packages.

Remote Desktop
Remote desktop capability is like having a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers plugged right into our servers. Because our servers can be accessed anywhere in the world, this allows you to have a work environment you can access from anywhere in the world without risking losing your files to a laptop, tablet, or phone thief. We offer remote desktop capabilities on all of our shell servers except for the SunOS server. We support x2go, nx, vnc, and rdp protocols. X2go is the best choice as it provides extremely efficient compression and X round trip removal as well as sound.

Applications
Applications include Office Suites such as Libre Office and Caligra (which can read and write Microsoft Office file formats), Web and Program Development tools such as Bluefish Editor as well as many other editors, compilers, interpreters, scripting languages, debuggers, profilers, and online documentation.

E-mail
Our e-mail system offers unprecedented flexibility. You can access your mail via shell mail readers including graphical mailers like Thunderbird, or via Web mail, or via pop-3 and imap mail protocols, complete with TLS encryption. Our mail system includes Bayesian filtering with Spam Assassin which can be individually configured for your needs. Procmail allows you to sort and process mail automatically. Smartlist allows you to maintain mailing lists.

Security[color]
Access to all of our servers is available via strong encryption. The shell servers all support ssh access. All of the remote desktop protocols tunnel via ssh. We maintain all of our servers up to date keep with the latest patches. Backups are made weekly.

[color=darkblue]Eskimo North has been providing Unix timeshare services since 1985. We have been providing Linux timeshare, shell access, web hosting, e-mail, and Internet services since 1992. Please take a look at our services as they support our free Federated services including Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Nextcloud, Pixelfed, and Yacy Search.

Available Shell Servers

We have a variety of Linux Servers with a variety of Linux Distributions and Desktop Environments. Linux servers in use here are of three basic lines, those derived from RedHat, such as Fedora, Centos, and Scientific Linux, and those derived from Debian such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint. Ubuntu is the most current and feature rich. Then there is Manjaro, derived from Arch Linux. Arch is more often broken because it is a real “do it yourself” Linux, an excellent learning platform, a good development platform, not a good production platform.

All of these servers are available if you have a shell account here. You can use them to learn various versions, decide which to install, and as one place you can develop applications for all versions. We install a wide variety of development tools on all of our publicly available servers.

Our servers listen to port 443 in addition to the standard ssh port of 22 to provide a means to connect from behind a firewall that blocks non-web access. You can also utilize Guacamole on our website (login public, password public).

Alma.Eskimo.Com
This server is running Alma 8. Alma Linux replaces Scientific Linux after it’s discontinuation. Presently we are running Alma 8 because Alma 9 does not support NIS out of the box although there are ways of hacking it in. It is unfortunate that Redhat chose to piss on the infrastructure so many organizations depend upon. This is why we tend to favor Debian derived flavors. None the less as Redhat derived software goes Alma is pretty solid.
Anduinos.Eskimo.Com
Anduinos is a Debian derived distribution that defaults to a Gnome Desktop themed to look like Windows 10. At present though this Desktop is not working over network connections, instead Mate and Gnome are presently available. I am working on some others.
Debian.Eskimo.Com
Debian Bullseye has a rich assortment of software installed, including hundreds of Games, a huge variety of Office Productivity software, many Educational and Scientific applications, a variety of Integrated Development Environments, and many programming languages. All of the documentation available online these applications is also loaded.
Fedora.Eskimo.Com
Fedora Rawhide can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate desktop. It has the most applications of any of the Redhat derived servers. I install just about everything I can get to work on this machine so it has a huge variety of applications installed.
Kali.Eskimo.Com
Kali is a special purpose shell server designed for penetration testing. It is primarily here to test our own internal security, and as a result, egress is extremely limited, however upon request, proof of IP space ownership, and permission of the owner and agreement to hold us harmless because it is possible some of these tests may be destructive, we will allow outbound for testing of other sites.
Manjaro.Eskimo.Com
Manjaro is a good choice for a Linux user who wants to just install and go. There is a pleasant user interface and a good choice of software in the Manjaro repositories. It is a less technical Linux than Ubuntu, you can do most things through graphical interfaces and the default xfce interface is extremely light in terms of memory footprint. Like most modern distros, a variety of Windows systems are available and we have Gnome, Mate, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and LXQT installed.
Mint.Eskimo.Com
Mint is another recent addition to our shell servers. It is running Mint, although we have the Mate Desktop installed for graphical access. This is necessary because Unity and other compositing Desktops are incompatible with x2go and really work very roughly with VNC. If you like games, this is a good server to use and there are many installed. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu which in turn is derived from Debian and this server thus follows the structure and layout of Debian and Ubuntu.
MxLinux.Eskimo.Com
MxLinux is an excellent choice for a computer with limited resources. Before the overhead of a Desktop is considered, MxLinux uses 200MB less RAM out of the box than does Ubuntu. If you’re not a fan of Poettering and Systemd, you’ll like this OS as it still uses a System-V init with Systemd shims to allow packages requiring systemd to function. You can also run systemd and in fact I am doing so because it boots faster. The default Desktop is LXDE which is also small and efficient. But if you like eye candy you can install any Desktop you like and as with other servers I will install all that I can get to work on this OS.
PopOS.Eskimo.Com
popOS is a modern appearing OS based upon Ubuntu, and not just indirectly, it actually utilizes Ubuntu’s repositories in addition to it’s own. The Desktops presently available on it are Gnome and Mate, though Gnome is a special edition known as Sparkle, and it does not operate properly with X2go. Presently X2go and ssh are the only two access methods. I am working on the others.
Rocky8.Eskimo.Com
Rocky8 is a RedHat derived operating system very similar to Centos before Centos was absorbed, and ruined, by Redhat. While Centos support, with the exception of Centos9 is going away on June 30th, 2024, and CentOS9 is not usable because of the deletion of NIS by RedRat which is necessary to our organization, Rocky8 will be supported for security updates through May of 2029, thus provides us a means of continuing to offer a Redhat based environment for another five years.

Ubuntu.Eskimo.Com
Ubuntu can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate Desktop. The native Unity desktop is a compositing desktop which is incompatible with x2go. This machine is equipped with many applications including a huge number of games, a rich assortment of development tools and computer programming languages, a huge assortment of Office productivity software, many scientific, electronic, and educational tools.
Zorin.Eskimo.Com
Zorin is a Ubuntu derived operating system. It combines the eye candy of some other Ubuntu flavors such as Mint, with the security awareness and up to date nature of Ubuntu providing a really superb server environment. This machine is our best equipped server. It has the full Ubuntu Studio Suite, a very large assortment of development tools, language packs for all supported languages, many games, both Libre and Caligra Office Suites, and much more. X2go is supported on this machine.

Crontab access, batch, and background jobs are allowed on all of our servers. Most have unrestricted outbound access with the exception of kali owing to high abuse potential for tools that exist on it.

mastodon - Link to source

The claim that Emil Bove told DOJ lawyers they might have to say "fuck you" to court orders rightfully shocked people. The full scope of lawyer Erez Reuveni's claims, however, paints an even more damning picture.

At Law Dork, here are 11 key allegations from the whistleblower disclosure: lawdork.com/p/11-key-allegatio…


11 key allegations made in Erez Reuveni's whistleblower disclosure about DOJ

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche attacked the claims as "falsehoods," but many of the fired longtime DOJ lawyer's allegations are already backed up by public facts.
Chris Geidner (Law Dork)

friendica - Link to source
Details of the "Indestructible Brotherhood-2025" and "Barrier-2025" trainings have been discussed in the Republic of Tajikistan en.odkb-csto.org/news/news_odk…

Details of the "Indestructible Brotherhood-2025" and "Barrier-2025" trainings have been discussed in the Republic of Tajikistan

OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
en.odkb-csto.org

lemmy - Link to source

The last time I checked, mods weren't supposed to be able to ban people from communities that those people never interacted in before. Did something change or is this a form of abuse/glitch/oversight?
I’ve been noticing this more and more in the modlogs, with it proven via the “creator” option in some instances’ modlogs that the people doing the bans were mods and not admins, and when I first joined Lemmy, one of the things that were held as a universal truth was that this absolutely could not happen.

plume - Link to source

Why Grove Crane Parts Are the Choice for Heavy Duty Jobs


 Grove crane parts are trusted for their precision, durability, and ability to perform under pressure. When paired with a crane parts supplier who delivers speed and accuracy, you've got a setup that keeps your job site productive and safe.

When a crane fails on a job site, the stakes are high—delays mount, budgets strain, and safety is at risk. Grove crane parts are trusted to keep cranes running smoothly, delivering reliability where it counts. Let's explore why these parts are a staple in the industry and how a dependable crane parts supplier ensures your project stays on track.

A Proven Name in Cranes


Grove has been building cranes for over 75 years, tackling some of the toughest projects worldwide—from towering skyscrapers to remote infrastructure builds. Grove crane parts are crafted with the same rigor, designed to match the durability and performance of their machines.

When you choose Grove parts, you're banking on a legacy of engineering excellence built for real-world challenges.

Why Grove Crane Parts Stand Out


Spot-On Fit
Grove parts are made specifically for their cranes, ensuring a perfect match. No modifications or guesswork—just a part that fits right and works right.

Tough Enough for Anything
Cranes operate in brutal conditions: dust, rain, extreme heat or cold. Grove crane parts are tested to handle these challenges, with materials chosen for strength and longevity.

Quick Recovery
With parts designed for seamless installation, repairs are fast. You swap out the part, run your checks, and get back to lifting—keeping downtime to a minimum.

Solid Support System
Grove backs their parts with comprehensive manuals and technical support, helping you nail every repair on the first try.

The Role of a Reliable Crane Parts Supplier


Great parts need great delivery. A trusted crane parts supplier ensures Grove crane parts arrive when and where you need them. Here's what matters:

  • Ready Inventory: They stock a wide range of parts, so you're not left waiting.
  • Fast Shipping: Quick delivery keeps your crane from sitting idle.
  • Model Expertise: They know Grove cranes and can identify the right part for your issue.
  • Order Precision: They deliver exactly what you need, no errors.

A good supplier is your lifeline, turning a breakdown into a quick fix.

OEM vs. Aftermarket: Why Grove Prevails


Aftermarket parts might seem cost-effective, but they carry risks. Grove crane parts are OEM, built to the exact specifications of your crane's original components. This guarantees performance and safety. Aftermarket parts often use cheaper materials or lack precision, leading to wear or even failure.

For critical systems like hydraulics or load-bearing parts, OEM Grove parts are the only choice that ensures reliability.

In Summary


Grove crane parts are trusted for their precision, durability, and ability to perform under pressure. When paired with a crane parts supplier who delivers speed and accuracy, you've got a setup that keeps your job site productive and safe.

In an industry where every moment counts, Grove parts and a reliable supplier are the keys to staying ahead.

Manitowoc Grove Crane Parts Supplies - HL Equipment

Explore our wide selection of Manitowoc Grove crane parts. Find the quality parts you need to keep your Grove crane in top condition.
www.crane-spares.com

friendica - Link to source
In Kyrgyzstan, a regular meeting of the Committee of Secretaries of the CSTO Security Councils was held en.odkb-csto.org/news/news_odk…

In Kyrgyzstan, a regular meeting of the Committee of Secretaries of the CSTO Security Councils was held

OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
en.odkb-csto.org

diaspora - Link to source
#1979
I'm a loner, but I'm never alone
Every night I get one step closer to the danger zone
Ian McDonald, British rock musician (saxophone, keyboards, guitar) (King Crimson, 1968-69; Foreigner, 1976-80) would be 79
youtu.be/uQoURkhD7b0?si=G6HxFl…

Dirty White Boy

Provided to YouTube by Atlantic RecordsDirty White Boy · ForeignerRecords℗ 1979 Atlantic Recording Corporation for the United States and WEA International In...
YouTube

mastodon - Link to source

Does #Starmer plan on branding everyone who disagree with him a terrorist?

What is the Palestine Action group, and why is the UK banning it?
The UK government is seeking to proscribe the pro-Palestinian direct action group under anti-terrorism laws.
aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/25/w…

#Palestine #ukpolitics #UK


What is the Palestine Action group, and why is the UK banning it?

Sarah Shamim (Al Jazeera)

mastodon - Link to source

Netflix removed its #Palestinian Stories film collection a few months ago.

Most of them are available on TPB, however, for example:

Farha (2021) (A film about the #Nakba) thepiratebay.org/description.p…

Born in Gaza (2014) thepiratebay.org/description.p…

Children of Shatila (1998) thepiratebay.org/description.p…

Divine Intervention (2002) thepiratebay.org/description.p…

#Palestine #PalestinianArt #Art4Palestine #Gaza #Genocide

(tack så mycket @palestinademonstranten)

The Pirate Bay - The galaxy's most resilient bittorrent site

thepiratebay.org

friendica - Link to source
The CSTO Secretary General Imangali Tasmagambetov took part in the First CSTO International Conference on Cyber Security in Kyrgyzstan en.odkb-csto.org/news/news_odk…

The CSTO Secretary General Imangali Tasmagambetov took part in the First CSTO International Conference on Cyber Security in Kyrgyzstan

OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
en.odkb-csto.org

lemmy - Link to source

Building A Multi-Platform Feed Reader App - is it Worthwhile?

The idea


I want to build an app, in which you can subscribe or follow profiles or feeds from multiple platforms, including various fediverse platforms (lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, etc), blogs, and others (no idea what else yet).

App will have optional smart filtering and sorting, and optional algorithm based on your reading habits.

The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from. It should feel like a lemmy app if you see a lemmy post, feel like Mastodon if it's Mastodon, etc. This is obviously a monumental effort, so I will have to make concessions (hence north star).

Motivation


I see the recession of multi-source or Multi-Platform feed readers (RSS) as quite unfortunate to user choice and freedom.

I think this app, will promote a few ideals of mine:
- being intentional about content we want on our feed
- breaking boundary between different platforms (which is the spirit of ActivityPub)
- promoting open platforms: encourage non-profitting creators to make their content accessible on these platforms, and readers to read from them.
- consuming internet content without data mining, addictive scrolling, and having the choice to smart filter or sort your feed.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that this is worthwhile?

Besides blog posts (RSS), lemmy, Mastodon, and other big fsdiverse platforms, what would you want to see on this app?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

don't like this

in reply to matcha_addict

lemmy - Link to source

FundMECFS

I think a lot of open social media accept the RSS format.

Like for example if you add a “.rss” to the end of a bluesky profile url you get the rss feed for it.

So this actually seems quite doable!

I would say its something you dont need top efficiency. Don’t do it in Rust. It’s fine to use python or something.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

You can follow us in other languages. Visit our website for more information wordsmith.social/protestation/…

Protestation

2023-06-11 11:27:05

ActivityPub - Link to source

Social


English– @protestation@friendica.eskimo.com

Français– @protestation@social.trom.tf– @protestation@mastodon.social

Deutsch– @protestation@friendica.opensocial.space

Português– @protestation@mastodon.acc.sunet.se– @protestation@friendicarg.nsupdate.info

Quotes– @protestation@embers.social– @protestation@freeradical.zone


mastodon - Link to source

Israel’s propaganda machine is relentless. So is @mondoweiss reporting.

We expose the lies, amplify Palestinian voices, and fight censorship.

Help us reach our $165,000 goal.

👉 Donate today: mondoweiss.net/mastodon

#Palestine #Israel
@palestine @israel

Image promoting donations to Mondoweiss. The text reads, "Censorship is rising. So is our resolve." There is a donate button in the bottom left corner.

Mondoweiss centers Palestinian voices

If you value independent journalism that prioritizes Palestinian voices and exposes the realities on the ground, Mondoweiss needs your help.
EveryAction
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

friendica - Link to source
The Working Group under the CSTO Council of Defense Ministers has discussed electronic warfare issues in Kyrgyzstan en.odkb-csto.org/news/news_odk…

The Working Group under the CSTO Council of Defense Ministers has discussed electronic warfare issues in Kyrgyzstan

OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger will visit the CSTO Secretariat and take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
en.odkb-csto.org

lemmy - Link to source

Mitigating the "7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins"

This article is a response to Tim Chambers' recent writeup, titled The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix). It's a pretty great read, and I'm writing this not as a rebuttal, but to analyze and expand on the points made.

This is a musing on 7 problems that have been pointed out, with some ideas on what progress has been made to fix them.


Mitigating the "7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins"

Thinking through Tim Chambers' writeup on how to deal with the sometimes very spotty UX of Open Social Web platforms.
Sean Tilley (deadsuperhero)

sanderium doesn't like this.

in reply to 反いじめ戦隊

lemmy - Link to source

Sean Tilley

Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.

It sounds more like you're talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that's basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!

Sean Tilley

2025-05-13 23:42:18

ghost - Link to source

My Dream Fediverse Platform


This article is a follow-up to an older post of mine, Towards a Greater Federated Architecture, and also a response from the wonderfully-thought out piece by Ben Werdmuller, If I Started Fresh. The goal here is to take the lessons learned from a variety of systems to propose the Fediverse platform I have always wanted to build: Postmodern.

No code has been written as of yet, but I am learning to program, from the bottom up, backend to frontend. I have some background in game design, Web development, and API clients, but I'm working on the more elusive foundational stuff. This is the only way I can possibly develop the confidence needed to build this thing.

The Fediverse, Social Web, Peopleverse, whatever you want to call it, has evolved considerably since it originally started back in 2008. During my entire time on the network, I've longed to design a platform of my own. I've learned a lot of lessons from amazing projects along the way: Hubzilla, Bonfire, Emissary, and ActivityPods have all done some really interesting things beyond what Mastodon offers to the network. I also think there's some really valuable ideas in both Nostr and Bluesky that are worth closer examination.

Before I dive into my technical brain-droppings of the past decade, let's establish a few core concepts.

Guiding Principles

1. It needs to be fun


On the surface, this might sound superfluous. What does it mean for a platform to be fun? This boils down to a few key areas that Fediverse platforms struggle with:

  • Ease of use - Good UX design is hard to execute well. As time goes on, I'm convinced that people want to use something without having to think too hard about conventions or side effects. They shouldn't have to dig under countless menus to find where the decentralization is.
  • Discovery - For the time being, the act of finding new, cool things to interact with or peruse is pretty bad. There's some promising work happening with Fediverse Discovery Providers. Regardless, discovery needs to also extend beyond simply finding stuff, and include a laser focus on finding people. Onboarding still kind of sucks, and there's a number of issues with trying to find your friends and connect with them.
  • Resiliency - One of the shakiest aspects of the Fediverse involves just how fragile instances can be. If an instance permanently goes down, and you didn't already have some alias set up to migrate your followers, you're dead in the water. Having to rebuild your social graph from scratch is the opposite of fun.
  • Control - This can mean a lot of different things: control over your timeline, control over how your space on the web looks, control over your connections, control over your data. A big missed opportunity in the space is that we'll say things like "you own your own data", but it's not exactly true. Your data mostly exists as a series of tables in a database, which can be serialized into a JSON export that you mostly can't use with anything.

It might seem like this is a catch-all, where you can throw any old thing into the guiding principle. Maybe it is. What I know is this: if the experience is bad for users, if they're getting harassed and seeing drama every day, if they don't really have much control over the platform, if they can't find their friends or cool things that interest them, then your platform is the opposite of fun.

2. Users should have maximum agency


Building on top of Principle #1, individual users should have total agency of how their experience is shaped online. This can be categorized in four ways:

  1. Visual / Conventional - the user decides what interfaces, themes, apps, and clients they will leverage to access the network. Custom designs and behaviors empower users to make their online space truly their own.
  2. Data Sovereignty - the user has strict controls over their data: what apps and services can use it, the extent to which different pieces are exposed to the Web, and the ability to seamlessly port the sum of that data from one place to another.
  3. Filtering and Connectivity - users should always be given the opportunity to decide what they see on their feeds, and what other people can see from them. This could take the form of filtering out keywords, blocking users and domains, leveraging a third-party labeling service, or being able to connect to individual accounts that may otherwise be banned instance-wide for everyone else.

Of course, this isn't to say that admins and moderators don't have a suitable place in community-building and curation. It's just that solely relying on them tends to result in communities where users have minimal input on policy, and admins have absolute authority. To me, this is a major barrier towards world-wide adoption of the Social Web, which is a goal for some of us in this massive, sprawling movement.

3. The platform must move the Fediverse forward


There's some absolutely amazing developments happening in the space. Most notably, the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals project has helped many different platforms standardize on undocumented behavior. It's the closest thing we have right now for improving ActivityPub implementations, in lieu of a formal update to the protocol spec.

FEPs are the reason why groups mostly just work across a variety of systems now, and related efforts such as the Threadiverse Working Group allows NodeBB, Discourse, Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin to federate together with minimal issues. It's not perfect, but the project is bearing a lot of fruit.

The problem is that some of the biggest projects in the space, such as Mastodon, have historically been pretty indifferent to these efforts. Often, they choose to forgo established agreed-upon FEPs to do their own thing, forcing everyone else to bend over backwards and support their unique way of doing things. At the end of the day, FEPs still aren't advancements in the ActivityPub protocol itself.

We need more Fediverse platforms to champion these collaborative efforts, both to help influence further development of the protocol as well as putting pressure on larger projects to work with the community.

4.) The experience must be unique


This might come across as wildly conceited, but I don't want to build yet another clone of a service that already exists. I mean no disrespect towards the people doing that, but I think we've barely managed to scratch the surface of what can be built. There's a certain appeal in imitating existing familiar designs and paradigms, and iterating on them to be better.

What I want to do is develop new concepts that aren't quite like anything else. Sure, there may be a passing resemblance to half a dozen different things, but I want to develop something bold. I'm tired of describing the Fediverse as "the alternative" and want so badly to instead describe it as "the future", but we have to take much bigger risks to get there.

Implementation Details


Here are some of the pipe-dream ideas I've been refining over the years. There are probably a lot of aspects that still need key considerations, some of which is still above my ability to program! I'm currently going to school for Computer Science, and practicing to make my coding skills more capable of tackling these big ideas.

Composable Interfaces


This is probably the biggest idea behind Postmodern, the platform I hope to one day abuild. What are Composable Interfaces? To keep it simple: composable interfaces are a way to construct a custom frontend with whatever data is available.

Composable interfaces are not necessarily new; prior art exists in the following Fediverse projects:

  • Hubzilla - You can write pages, a custom theme, and widgets using an elaborate template system. You have to write it yourself by hand, there's not really a way to preview these changes, and some of the more high-level customization has to be done by making calls to pieces of code that aren't super well-documented.
  • Bonfire - Customization is largely accomplished through modules, which can be bundled together into a sort of unique software distribution. So, you can choose to add a group forum module, a wiki module, and a video module, and Bonfire will snap those pieces together for you. Super interesting, kind of complicated, still yet to be battle-tested for communities.
  • Emissary- Really wild template system built on HTMX and HyperScript. Emissary is really different from other projects because it allows developers to dictate data schemas and actions from within the view template. A lot of contemporary developers might balk at this, because it kind of violates the MVC design pattern. However, Emissary is crazy flexible, and makes it possible for a developer to add support for custom Activity types and actions with a single template.
  • Dokieli - a full-blown decentralized client-side editing tool. It implements ActivityPub, Linked Data, and a swath of other technologies related to Solid. It's extremely powerful, but the interface looks like it has a significant learning curve. It's hard even for me, a Fediverse nerd with 15 years of experience, to fully grok.

Looking at these concepts, I think Emissary and Dokieli come the closest to what I want to build. The ability to build a custom UI with unique capabilities just by dictating what the template is doing is awfully compelling.

My personal head-cannon differs in one specific way: take Dokieli, and marry its capabilities with that of Emissary. Focus on the page-building, widget-building, stream-building elements, and give people the power to delve into a vast pool of social data that they can edit client-side without having to touch any template code themselves.
Don't worry, this ugly thing is just a mockup. There's a lot to figure out.
Instead of taking inspiration from page-building tools like Gutenberg, Elementor, or Wix, my thoughts are to instead take inspiration from layer-based image editors. Each layer in the builder/inspector thing is a component, which can be altered, rearranged, and adjusted in a number of different ways. You can mix and match existing components, or compose your own from scratch by reaching into the pool of data that your account is aware of. It's not unlike the WordPress approach to Blocks in 2025...but, hopefully this approach can be more intuitive.
Again, this is just conceptual. A whole lot of things need refinement.
For this to be viable, a lot of work would need to be done to overcome any potential learning curve. The tools need to be accessible, with the page layout exactly matching what the user sees on the screen.The experience could really suck if it's not implemented carefully. After all, we have to follow the first guiding principle: it has to be fun. Fighting with an editing tool is not that.
I wanted to draw more widget ideas, but I need to finish writing this.
To accomplish this, the most straightforward approach would be to create a core set of widgets with data types and settings, bundled together for different experiences. I'm calling these bundles-of-things complications, which can be thought of as the snapping together of atomic units to make something greater. An experience that has a lot of complications put together would pretty much work as its own frontend made of stylized, curated pieces.

If this sounds way, way complicated: yeah, I know. For a social client frontend, this idea pushes a lot of boundaries. I have some ideas about how to get there (maybe use GraphQL for the builder?), but a lot of it is going to probably diverge from the standard Web application stack. I have a lot of homework to do.

Next-Gen Permissions System


I've written about this a bit before in my last article about moving the Fediverse forward, but we need to get our act together about permissions systems. Mastodon's offering is woefully lacking when it comes to granularity.
Sigh.
ActivityPub has these nifty things called Collections, which is really just a representation of a collection of objects. You can pretty much put any object in there, so in a roundabout way, you can create a scoped list of people you're connected with. Theoretically, you could use collections of people as privacy scopes, dictating who can see certain things, or certain versions of things.



Projects such as Bonfire have taken the logical next step, where it's possible to establish boundaries and barriers for different collections of people, under a variety of conditions. This can apply to everything from individual posts to group communities to whatever else you can come up with.

I think it's absolutely important that we build a system that not only accounts for message delivery and access, but capabilities as well. You the user should be the one that dictates whether people can see a post, boost it, reply to it, whatever. In a decentralized system, this is kind of hard to figure out, but not impossible.

I still hold the belief that Object Capabilities might be our best bet, and Christine Lemmer-Webber published a paper a few months ago detailing what oCap-enabled ActivityPub would look like.m

Data as Documents


Some people will disagree with me here, but I think a document database architecture might be the way to go for this whole thing. A traditional relational database might be too limiting for this kind of insane flexibility, especially when you consider how different platforms try to account for the complex data structures necessary for ActivityPub.

Pleroma, for example, historically used the jsonb data type in PostgreSQL to hold reams and reams of nested JSON data. At a small scale, it's not so bad, but ActivityPub data can grow exponentially when you're interacting with lots of people and content.

For some time now, I've been thinking a lot about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Project. When first approaching Solid, it seems super abstract and complicated. You get all these people talking about RDF, TripleStores, Quads, WebID, and a lot of other stuff. As someone that has a pretty firm grasp on Fediverse systems, Solid initially caused a vein to bulge in my temple. I went on to explain the semantics here.
A file manager, representing files in a Solid Pod
TL;DR: Solid is kind of a specification for data, data storage, and access. It allows users to store their data in pods, and that data is represented as different kinds of documents and metadata. There is no relational database. Instead, the data in your Solid pod is used as a database itself. If you wanted to migrate all of the posts you've ever made, Solid makes it super easy to pick all that stuff up and move it somewhere else.
An ActivityPods instance. All of these applications access the same pool of data.
ActivityPods manages to marry the two concepts, and does the heavy lifting to translate these documents and data into something ActivityPub implementations can understand, and vice versa. The real magic here is that ActivityPods makes the act of building ActivityPub apps relatively seamless and straightforward. Developers don't have to think about both ActivityPub and Solid. They just need to write an ActivityPub app.
Mastopod, an ActivityPub social app that uses Solid.
I still have some outstanding questions about whether ActivityPods can effectively scale up. The Solid community in general is pretty small, and ActivityPods is an even smaller subset of either Solid or ActivityPub communities. A large-scale community instance with over 100,000 users (who all individually have their own pods) doesn't feel that feasible to me.

Still, I respect everything these guys are doing, and I think about building on top of ActivityPods pretty often.

Relay-Based Supportive Infra


Fediverse instances suffer somewhat from a fragile network. In fact, I would go as far as stating that tethering user accounts to Fediverse instances is an antipattern. We've mistakenly followed this trend for a long time, and put the sum of a user's entire social graph into one server. If that server goes down for good, you're toast.
A Nostr client's network settings, showing many different relays.
Nostr doesn't have this problem, because it doesn't have instances. Instead, user accounts are free-floating, peer-to-peer identities that dispatch posts to individual relays. Instead of individual instances where everybody logs on to post, everything is done through clients. Your identity is basically a public key, tied to a profile and some posts.

What I'm advocating for isn't necessarily the prioritization of one method over the other, but a hybrid approach that includes the best of both. What if Fediverse identities could be free-floating, separate things from instances, that persist even when an instance goes down?

Suppose that the Move activity in ActivityPub was just a method for detaching the identity from one instance, and attaching to another? Or, taking the approach that Hubzilla takes, suppose that you could mirror your identity to multiple instances by attaching your identity to multiple servers? You post in one place, it shows up somewhere else, too.

Another way that relays could be useful is in attacking the notorious Discovery Problem so prevalent in the Fediverse. As Nostr has continued to evolve, different relays have emerged that specialize in specific things:

  • Caching
  • Hosting Media
  • Search
  • Premium Long-Term Storage

Theoretically, it could also be possible for relays to take on the role of Fediverse Discovery Providers. These things could not only act as an index of content and people, but conduits that pull in news, book reviews, events, and maybe even a contact directory. Maybe your instance could just subscribe to relays, rather than trying to broker message dispatching and pulling in new content itself.

A Single-Identity Ecosystem


Finally, we get to what I consider to be the Achilles heel of today's Fediverse. As highlighted in previous sections, I think we do a terrible job of handling identity. In fact, we don't really do any job at all.
Sigh
Part of the problem here is that every Fediverse server in the network is a full-blown platform, rather than a client. The decision of the Mastodon project was to forgo the Client-To-Server part of the ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a bespoke API of its own. Mastodon's API grew so popular that many other Fediverse platforms adopted it, just to have access to a vast amount of compatible apps.

The primary side effect of every Fediverse server being a platform instead of a client is that every platform needs its own account to be used. This quickly leads to a nightmare scenario where it's possible to have 15 different accounts floating around that don't actually connect to each other in any meaningful way.
Reimagining various platforms as client frontends instead, using the same profile.
Granted, the Client-To-Server API has its fair share of complaints. It's under-documented, clients are expected to handle all logic on the client side, and seemingly nobody uses it anyway. However...it still exists, can be improved upon, and could be used in conjunction with ActivityPods.

I'm greatly interested in the prospect of building ActivityPods apps that work with Postmodern, where you're really just viewing different crafted experiences in specific clients.

In Conclusion


Congratulations on getting to the end of my big, weird rant about how I'd do things. Some of these ideas remain unproven, and may not actually be the solutions I end up going with. Still, much of this exists as the byproduct of lessons learned from observing different Fediverse platforms evolve over time. I hope to start by building small prototypes to test out various ideas.

Some of this (all of it?) might be super convoluted and complicated. The biggest thing I want to focus on, however, is the experience of building composable interfaces. I think this idea really has legs, and could potentially be a radically different approach to building for the Social Web.

If you have any insights, ideas, suggestions, or critiques, please feel free to reach out! This article was, believe it or not, something of a shortlist. There's a lot of things I didn't discuss (Bluesky-styled labelers, custom feeds, etc) that still belong in this vision somewhere. For now, these are simply the topics most resonant to me, that I wanted to pay special attention to.


If I started fresh

How I’d build a resilient, community-first platform for the open web.
Ben Werdmuller (Werd I/O)

in reply to Sean Tilley

lemmy - Link to source

反いじめ戦隊

critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems


Which are solvable by creating a customized SNS frontend.

Lemmy is a community first centric ActivityPub network, thus most frontend tailor UX for community engagement, and not SNS.

Similarly Peertube is for videos, thus the UX will tailor for videos centric experiences.

What you detailed was a SNS tailored UX, not a community or video one.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

diaspora - Link to source

mudflap

2025-06-25 13:17:10

diaspora - Link to source

@Theaitetos (Рцяэыоод) - sad news:

dexerto.com/youtube/youtubes-s…

#Fox #Foxes #MikaylaRaines #animals



YouTube’s Save A Fox founder Mikayla Raines dies from suicide after online harassment

Save a Fox founder and popular YouTuber Mikayla Raines has died after taking her own life due to bullying and harassment.
Virginia Glaze (Dexerto)

hubzilla - Link to source

Fake Ghetto Girl Jasmine Crockett Comes in Last

Pretending to be a ghetto girl isn’t working as well as Jasmine Crockett thought it would. Lacking total self-awareness, she put in her bid to become the Ranking member of House Oversight Committee and came in last. Crockett is actually a privileged private school graduate.

Fake Ghetto Girl Jasmine Crockett Comes in Last

Pretending to be a ghetto girl isn't working as well as Jasmine Crockett thought it would. Lacking total self-awareness, she put in her bid to become the Ranking member of House Oversight Committee and came in last.
M Dowling (Independent Sentinel)

friendica - Link to source
Iran Shows Us Why The US And Israel Should Not Be Allowed To Have Nukes thealtworld.substack.com/p/ira…

Iran Shows Us Why The US And Israel Should Not Be Allowed To Have Nukes

Caitlin Johnstone- After pumping out deception and fake diplomacy in order to assist Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran and launch an unprovoked attack, Trump celebrated his facilitation of a ceasefire.
thealtworld (TheAltWorld’s Newsletter)
in reply to FundMECFS

lemmy - Link to source

rumschlumpel

Technically Schyzerdütsch is High German (you could even say it's the Highest German, considering elevation), while what most Germans call 'Hochdeutsch' is actually standard german (which, to be fair, is mostly derived from High and Middle German dialects, as opposed to Low German (and Middle German is much more similar to High German than to Low German)).
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

friendica - Link to source
Seven Israeli Soldiers Killed in Khan Yunis Ambush: All the Details #Palestine palestinechronicle.com/seven-i…

Seven Israeli Soldiers Killed in Khan Yunis Ambush: All the Details - Palestine Chronicle

A single Palestinian resistance fighter triggered a deadly ambush in southern Gaza, killing seven Israeli soldiers and wounding sixteen.
admin (Palestine Chronicle)

mastodon - Link to source

Podcast: Reacting to Zohran Mamdani's primary victory, Peter Feld says, "It's proven that Zionism is a paper tiger in Democratic politics and that the emperor has no clothes."

mondoweiss.net/2025/06/breakin…

#Palestine #Israel #ZohranMamdani #USpol
@palestine @israel


Breaking down Zohran Mamdani’s stunning New York victory

Reacting to Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory, Peter Feld says, “It’s proven that Zionism is a paper tiger in Democratic politics and that the emperor has no clothes.”
Michael Arria (Mondoweiss)

ActivityPub - Link to source
She said " we will continue to take any possibility of foreign interference extremely seriously"
This IS foreign interference
"What we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, the president of Argentina and so on, we penetrate the cabinets… I know that least half Trudeau’s cabinet or even more than half of his cabinet are actually from our young global leaders of the World Economic Forum" Klaus Schwab
youtu.be/bvCE3fAqUNQ?si=u9Za1C…

Liberal Minister Gets ANGRY On LIVE TV With Reporters!

Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand spoke with reporters ahead of the start of the 2025 NATO meeting in the Netherlands, and was not impressed by th...
YouTube

lemmy - Link to source

[Solved] "[OK] Reached target Graphical Interface" after login before getting booted back to the login screen

Hey all, semi-novice Linux user here.

I'm running EndeavourOS with KDE on a Lenovo with an Intel CPU and integrated GPU.

I was attempting to update my system today but kept getting the error referenced in this newsletter that I found after looking for the error online. I ran each command in the newsletter exactly as written and then rebooted my system.

After rebooting, I'm able to successfully get to the login screen and input my username/password but, instead of my desktop, logging in takes me to a command interface for about a second before reverting to the same login screen. The line in the title is the last entry shown in that command interface.

I've looked online for solutions but it doesn't seem like anyone with my same error is getting stuck on the login screen (most people seem to be stuck on Grub and are able to use e, ctrl+alt-F2, etc) and I'm just sorta lost on what to do at this point.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Thank you to MyNameIsRichard for your help. It turns out that I needed to install plasma-x11-session as I am still an x11 user and a recent update made it necessary to install this package manually.

Arch Linux - News: linux-firmware >= 20250613.12fe085f-5 upgrade requires manual intervention

archlinux.org
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
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